Today is not Thursday

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So. This is not Thursday. This is not a good beginning for a weekly blog post, to be a day late in the second week.

However! I do have a writing-related reason. I needed to post a story for critique today and I was working on it yesterday. (Yes, I could have done that earlier…)

What I’ve been working on

As mentioned last week, I am currently working on three different stories, of very different lengths and subject matter.

Dispersed

Over the long weekend (Monday was Thanksgiving in Canada), I worked on this, incorporating the comments I received in workshop.

I think it’s improving (a lot). It is also getting much longer, having gained over 2000 words in the last couple of weeks. It’s close to 7500 words now, so just on the edge of short story length.

The length is fine, it is what it is. The larger issue is that it takes that much longer to do each editing pass. And I will need to slightly adjust where I submit it. But I have a list for that already, so I have no reason to procrastinate on that when the story is ready.

Ideally, I’ll have this finished by the end of the month. Most of the developmental work is done. There are a few elements I want to tweak, but they are backstory and explanatory things, nothing central to the story or characters. Most of the remaining work is polishing.

There’s still laundry

This Story a Day story from last month is the one I submitted today for critique. It’s short (around 1300 words) and about ghosts adjusting to life after death. 

I really like it (although I went through my predictable ‘this story is absolutely awful’ stage yesterday). Anyway, I’m looking forward to the comments I get on this and moving forward with it after.

The other story I’ve been working on is called (for now) Generation Pothos, about a generation ship and with a heavy plant theme. I didn’t get around to it this week. I’ll return to this once I’m done with Dispersed (and probably after November). I’m eager to get it to it, but I don’t think it will suffer from further back of mind thinking. The only strong thing about it right now is the premise, so more thinking about it will probably benefit the story in the long run.

What’s coming next

Next month is November and that means Nanowrimo, which I seem incapable of resisting. But I’m not writing another novel first draft (tempting though that always is).

Instead, I’m going to develop the (very) short stories set in my novella universe that I wrote in September into a collection. I have 15 stories and I have arranged them in chronological order. They’re all around 800 words and I plan on expanding them (2000 words on average) and then editing them (although not necessarily to completion).

Ideally, the stories will stand alone enough to be submitted to various places individually, but I am also aiming for a novella-length story collection that has its own internal logic.

That’s all for this week. Take care.

I finished the novella

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Last month, I found that having a very set schedule for posting here, with predetermined topics to write on, worked really well. Previously I have been far more vague (for example, deciding to write 2 blog posts per month, but without specifics) and then it just doesn’t happen.

So, I am going to be posting each week on Thursday about what I have been working on for the past week and anything else writing-adjacent that I feel like.

(I realize that I could turn this into a newsletter, but that feels like work — in the sense that I actually produce newsletters for work and I’d rather not do another at the moment.)

What I’ve been working on

I completed another full edit (on paper) of the novella I’ve been working on since June and entered those changes into the electronic version. 

Once that was done, I debated with myself as to whether I wanted to do another on-screen edit before submitting, but ultimately decided against it. In the last edit, many of the edits were changes in word choice that were not particularly meaningful. (In fact, I think I changed back some of the edits I had made in the previous pass…) I was becoming a little concerned that I was going to start making things worse by fiddling unnecessarily.

So I wrote the cover letter (including a synopsis that I truly hope makes sense) and submitted it to Neon Hemlock on Wednesday.

From very first idea (thanks to Premee Mohamed’s Writing Sci-Fi Like A Scientist online class with Clarion West) to submission, it took almost exactly five months. The final version is about 21 000 words.

I don’t think I would have finished it so quickly (and efficiently, as it turned out) were it not for the novella accountability class I took with Kate Heartfield through Loft Literary over the summer which took me through the first 15 000 words.

Now that the novella is off in the world, I can turn my attention back to shorter stories. There are three I am currently focused on.

Dispersed: I submitted this story for workshopping in the class I’m currently taking with Cat Rambo and now I’m integrating the (incredibly useful) comments I got. 

An earlier, somewhat different version of the beginning of this story (with a different title) was a Critique Week story last year with the Story A Day Superstars group. I’ve been working on it, on and off, for a while now. I think I have changed almost everything now except the setting and the broadest interpretation of the plot, but it is definitely much closer to what I want.

There’s still laundry: This is a Story a Day story from just last month, a lighthearted story about the underworld. I think it will end up being rather short, maybe 1200 words. I really like how the setting has developed.

Then there’s what I am tentatively calling Generation Pothos. This started out as an idea for themed submission call, but what I was writing wasn’t quite right for it. It’s about a generation ship that is not going to reach its intended destination. The twist is that most of the library and electronic files that would have told them about Earth and everything else were lost and all they know about (or the only thing they know a great deal about) is plants.

Story A Day #5: what I’ve been writing

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And already we are at the end of September! It has gone by so quickly. 

Here are the summaries of my last six stories for this month. I am happy that I managed thirty stories this month. As usual, it is the sense of community, and the accountability that comes with that, of the Story A Day Superstars group that has made this possible.

I couldn’t be this productive without them. (I am writing this while in a writing spring with three of that group who join me manyThursday nights. It is so fortunate to have such a community.)

On to the stories!

On September 25, the prompt was Anita G. Gorman Is Mysterious. 

This prompt of Anita’s — two dates on a piece of paper in your own handwriting  — is great. I have said before that my favourite prompts are highly specific, because I love seeing how totally different stories can from the same precise beginning. My story was about a woman with dementia that she has as the result of time travel.

The prompt for September 26 was to write A Story In Memos. For this one, I wrote another one of my novella-prequel stories. My main-prequel-character  communicates (through memos!) with her younger brother, who is in a place of political/bureaucratic power and is firmly refusing to address a looming crisis.

September 27’s prompt was Miriam Laundry Cites The Golden Rule, but I did not write a children’s story about the Golden Rule.

Instead, I wrote a story about theoretical non-existent children, so that’s at least adjacent to the prompt! This was another novella-prequel story, as my all-but-immortal beings do not reproduce (it’s a long story and their inability to reproduce is related to the micro-evolutionary changes that resulted in them being all-but-immortal).

The prompt for September 28 was Leslie Stack Objects To This Marriage. This is another great, specific prompt, although I used it not so much as the central theme of the story I wrote, as much as a jumping off point. Yet another novel-prequel piece, this one begins with the characters watching an old movie (in which, yes, someone objects to a marriage) which is quickly abandoned to discuss a technological advancement.

The September 29 prompt was to write a story in three sections, each section recounting the same event from a different character’s point of view. For this I wrote about the first death amongst the all-but-immortal (emphasis on the all-but part in this case) from the points of view of the one who died, the one who was working with them, and their partner.

And finally today, the last day of Story A Day, the prompt was to write a story about someone who has just completed a huge challenge. What have they learned? What did they sacrifice? Was it worth it?

This was perfect for another/last novella-prequel story. I wrote about my all-but-immortal main character considering the place they have built for the people who will replace them.

And that’s all for this Story A Day September.